Artwork and animations for Sakka!

Sakka's design changed quite a bit from the placeholder, as I felt he looked boring in general and particularly didn't like how he looked too much like Lalli. I made him taller and ganglier and tweaked his skin color to be more of a neon yellow-green to make him look less like Lalli, and exaggerated his tight-lipped glare into a squiggle-mouth grimace that I felt was more fun to look at. I also piled a ton of unusual visual queues into his clothing; I didn't want to appropriate too much from any real-world faiths, but I did want to give the impression that this character is from a special world that rejects the shifting trends of the outside in favour of its own sacred traditions. Apparently in my mind this means tied-up pants and metal shards for earrings.

In keeping with our running theme of redesigning a character from the same metaclass as the one that got art, Ajatta's active has had a new effect added to it: it now applies 50% Psychic Vulnerability to its victims, before any damage is dealt. On top of feeling a bit underpowered in general, Ajatta had a subtle difference from the way other characters' kits were designed, in that her active didn't directly amplify the effect of her passive or vice versa; because a large part of the game is upgrading characters' passives with items, this would mean Ajatta would fall even farther behind other characters as the player progresses since her scaling with items was more limited. Now, her passive damage burst will be even stronger if it is triggered by her active, or shortly aferwards. This also opens up synergy between her and Sakka which is always fun!

And with that, all 12 characters due to be playable in the next FREE demo have been fully added! Here is a lovely image of our full lineup. The character select screen is starting to look very nicely cluttered:

 Next I will continue prettifying the game's VFX. I made a bit of progress on that when I couldn't work on the character art for a bit, so it shouldn't take too much longer to get that done.